TWO years ago, when the television producer John Langley bought the $3.5 million, seven-bedroom house here that is now his family’s weekend retreat, with its wine cellar, vineyards and canyon vistas that once stood in for Shangri-La in “Lost Horizon,” he wasn’t entirely sure what inspired him to purchase it. Except that he had a grandfather — a wildcatter, con man and scofflaw by trade — who, according to legend, once owned property in Ojai, and Mr. Langley liked the idea of returning.

“I thought it was appropriate,” he said in a recent conversation. “I thought it was justice.”

Justice is a subject that Mr. Langley knows something about, having made his reputation and his fortune as a creator of the reality series “Cops.” For almost two decades, “Cops” has dutifully documented police officers as they contend with backyard perp chases, domestic disputes and the occasional moving violation committed by a woman in a bikini. On Sept. 29, three weeks after its season premiere, Fox will celebrate the show with a 20th-anniversary special (despite the fact that it made its debut in 1989).

The longevity of “Cops,” on network television and in syndication, has given Mr. Langley the means to own homes here and in Manhattan Beach, Calif.; to buy restaurants in both cities; and to create his own line of Argentine wines. He has also been enriched in other ways: he has seen his attitudes on crime and punishment in America altered dramatically by the experience of “Cops.” He has also learned to withstand the criticism directed at the show, and to see “Cops” as a different proposition from a generation’s worth of tabloid fare that it inspired.

Mr. Langley, 64, had little interest in law enforcement at the start of his career. Born in Oklahoma City and raised in Manhattan Beach, he had earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in comparative literature and had nearly completed a Ph.D. thesis at the University of California, Irvine, on the philosophy of aesthetics when he decided to pursue work in Hollywood.

He wrote screenplays; did research for Gene Roddenberry, the creator of “Star Trek”; and worked as a publicist on movies. But it was not until 1983, when he and his former producing partner Malcolm Barbour made “Cocaine Blues,” an independent documentary on the drug trade and the various tolls it had taken on the country, that Mr. Langley was able to gain any traction in the film industry. (Mr. Barbour retired from producing in 1994.)

“I think I made a grand total of $6,000 that year,” Mr. Langley said. “I basically starved doing it, with three children to feed.”

He continued to work where he could — as a second-unit director on the Tom Hanks comedy “Volunteers,” as the director of a Dolph Lundgren fitness video — until “Cocaine Blues” caught the attention of Geraldo Rivera, who approached Mr. Langley and Mr. Barbour to produce a series of television documentaries called “American Vice: The Doping of a Nation.” Broadcast in syndication, “American Vice” consisted of cinéma vérité ride-alongs with police officers investigating drug-related crimes, and featured three live drug busts.

A few years later, the new Fox network was scrambling for programming to distinguish itself from its entrenched competitors, and it turned to Mr. Langley and Mr. Barbour. In 1988 the two played their pilot episode of “Cops” for a roomful of skeptical executives, including Barry Diller, then the chairman of Fox, and a taciturn man Mr. Langley assumed was an accountant.

At the end of the presentation, Mr. Langley recalled, the mystery figure, named Rupert Murdoch, declared, “Order four of ’em.”

Those four episodes of “Cops” turned into nearly 700, and some of the show’s earliest advocates say they are not surprised by its endurance. “You don’t look at the 10 o’clock news going, ‘Is this going to come off the air in four years?’ ” said Stephen Chao, a former development executive at Fox’s television stations group. “It’s never obsolete. It doesn’t wear out the way a Dick Wolf franchise wears out.”

Mr. Chao, who ordered the show’s pilot and remains a frequent guest at Mr. Langley’s breakfast table, added that though Mr. Langley “likes to project a really easygoing manner and a simple-folk, Okie thing, he had this incredible clarity about what was right and this agenda for the show.”

In nearly 20 years, the formula for “Cops” has not changed at all, from its abundant affection for hand-held cameras to its lack of voice-over narration and music (save for its familiar theme song, “Bad Boys,” by the reggae band Inner Circle).

What has changed is Mr. Langley’s attitude toward the people depicted on the show, those who uphold the law, as well as those who break it.

“When I first went into this business, I thought, well, if they commit a crime, they should do the time,” Mr. Langley said.

But having seen America’s prison population soar to more than 2.2 million, and with widespread prison overcrowding in California, Mr. Langley says he now believes the nation should be reconsidering which crimes should be punishable by imprisonment. “A lot of our attention is dedicated to arresting people who have drug problems,” he said, “when the real solution may be to rehabilitate them.”

Too often, he added, “we’re asking police officers to solve social issues, and that’s not their job.”

“They want to arrest people that really deserve to be arrested,” he continued, those “who are a threat to society itself.”

With the controlled substance of choice shifting from cocaine to crack to methamphetamine, Mr. Langley acknowledged that his show has been an inadvertent beneficiary of America’s drug problem. “What makes ‘Cops’ run?” he asked. “Drugs, drugs, drugs. What’s wrong with society? Drugs, drugs, drugs.”

But he vigorously denied that “Cops” was exploiting the criminal suspects who appear on the show, pointing out that they all sign release forms. “When they hear that we’re not a news camera, that we’re ‘Cops,’ ” Mr. Langley said, “they generally exclaim, ‘Oh, that’s great! When will I be on?’ ”

And though the early success of “Cops” helped paved the way for more manipulative reality series, Mr. Langley argued that his show’s social conscience distinguished it from its willfully trashy imitators.

“People that say it’s a guilty pleasure drive me crazy,” he said. “Is that because they’re experiencing schadenfreude, or is it because they feel guilty, because they see that there are things in society that are perhaps not right, that need attention, that need fixing?”

Nick Navarro, the former sheriff of Broward County, Fla., who allowed his officers to be documented in both “American Vice” and “Cops,” said “Cops” had made great strides in combating the guns-a-blazing stereotypes of law enforcement officers put forth by popular culture and in making police departments more transparent around the country.

“We don’t go around shooting people left and right, and then blowing the smoke off the barrel of the gun,” said Mr. Navarro, who now owns a private security company in Fort Lauderdale. “Who pays our salaries as police officers? The public. Who has a right to know everything that we’re doing, whether we’re doing it right or we’re doing it wrong? The public.”

Though Mr. Langley has tried to resist the temptation to create another reality show set in the world of law enforcement, his newest series is a sequel of sorts to “Cops”: titled “Inside American Jail” in the incarnation that has appeared on Court TV since August, and “Jail” in the version that made its debut on My Network TV on Sept. 4, the show tracks perpetrators after they are arrested and is produced by Mr. Langley’s 33-year-old son, Morgan.

Despite having seen his father pioneer an untested television format and in so doing help define the character of a struggling broadcast network, Morgan Langley has said he does not expect “Jail” to achieve the same degree of success.

“That would be miraculous,” he said. “If we could even help out a little bit, that would be nice.”

Expanded coverage of the new television season and a calendar of notable programs will appear in a special section on Sept. 23.

A version of this article appears in print on , on page 237 of the New York edition with the headline: Like the 10 O’Clock News, ‘Cops’ Endures. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe